


The Boss

by Licoriceallsorts



Category: Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-22 23:59:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Licoriceallsorts/pseuds/Licoriceallsorts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Tseng got his nickname. Pre-Compilation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boss

**Author's Note:**

> 'Rosalind' is BC Turk 'Gun', Elena's much-older sister.

Once, when Reno was sixteen years old, he’d played a little prank on the department. It was about a year after he’d joined the Turks, four years before Tseng was promoted to second-in-command.  Or maybe you wouldn’t call it a prank so much as a joke. Funny ‘coz it’s true. It had taken him a couple of days to get it right.  First he’d had to type it on the computer, testing out different fonts until he found the one that looked official, and adding the logo, re-sized upwards. Then he’d had to wait till no one was around before using the printer.  The next day, he’d quietly lifted down, from its spot on the wall by the elevators, the departmental floor directory ( _Welcome to Floor 48: Administrative Research. Conference Room, 4801; Interview Room, 4802;  Kitchen, 4803....)_ carried it into the materia room, opened the frame, removed the directory and replaced it with his own handiwork. Making a quick check to see that no one was looking, he’d then hung the frame back on the wall.

            He was far too impatient to wait for results. Besides, if Tseng saw it first, it’d come straight down and nobody would get the chance to appreciate his wit. If the Chief saw it first he’d get a swift clip round the ear into the bargain, but Reno was willing to risk that.

            “Hey,” he called, “Hey, guys. Something kinda funny here.”

            They appeared through various doors – Rosalind from the kitchen, Cissnei from their shared work room, and Rude up from the lounge where he’d been reading the paper ( _god, he’d still had hair then, dark brown, thick, curly. Like another lifetime)._

“Hey, look,” said Reno, “We got a new directory.”

            A little suspiciously – because they knew him, knew that grin on his face – they’d gathered around him. And this is what they’d read:

 **  
_SHINRA ELECTRIC POWER COMPANY  
WELCOMES YOU TO  
VELD’S HOME FOR  
STRAY DOGS  
ABANDONED CHILDREN  
AND LOST CAUSES_   
**

“You wrote that,” said Rosalind at once, not amused.

            Rude snorted a laugh.

            “That’s you, man,” said Reno, putting his finger on 'stray dogs' _._

“Woof,” Rude panted.

            Cissnei – who was fifteen and a half and officially their rookie; even though she’d been on the payroll for longer than Reno she’d only started in the office two weeks before, and in that short time she’d already managed to inform him nine times, in a variety of ways, that he was the most annoying asshole she’d ever had the misfortune to meet  - Cissnei had given a throaty little laugh and looked at Reno like she was maybe thinking of revising her opinion of him upwards just a notch. _Score!_

            “Very funny, Reno,” said Rosalind in that tone which meant it was anything but. “Now take it down.”

            Reno pointed his finger at 'lost causes'. “You know that’s you, Roz, don’t you?”

            “Takes one to know one.”

            “I’ll just make it official… “ He’d taken a marker pen from his top pocket - it had happened to be a red one, which meant his painstaking masterpiece would be ruined, but who cared? – and scribbled her name next to 'lost causes', saying out loud as he did so, “Roz – a – lind – “

            “That’s not even how you spell it. Give me that – “ Grabbing the pen, she pushed him aside, crossed out her name and wrote _R-E-N-O. “_ Fixed!” she cried.

            The elevator pinged and the lift doors opened. There stood Tseng in all his you’ll-never-be-as-good-as-me-so-don’t-even-bother-trying perfection, his suit immaculately pressed, his shoes polished, not a hair out of place in that dinky ponytail that by all rights ought to have looked as sissy as a girl’s blouse but somehow just fucking _didn’t._

He stared at them, unblinking. It wasn’t the kind of stare people stared when they were wrong-footed or taken by surprise. It was like a cat’s stare. _What pathetic activity are you engaged in now, puny mortals?_

            Reno had told Rude once that he was sure Tseng had had that dot put in the middle of his forehead so he could use it to hypnotise people.

            Right from day one Tseng had rubbed Reno up the wrong way. It wasn’t any one thing he did or said. It was _everything_.  Reno had no problem taking orders from the Chief; he feared Veld, and not because of the beatings. Shit, he’d put up with worse when he was smaller than what the Chief dished out.  A kid screwed up, he got his ass kicked; that was life. What Reno feared – what really, surprisingly, hurt - was the look of disappointment on the Chief’s face. _Why did you let yourself down, Reno? I know you can do better than this._

            Nobody else had ever suggested to him that he had the potential to amount to something; he wasn’t entirely convinced of it himself, and he lived in daily fear that the Chief might wake up one morning to the realization that he’d been wrong about Reno; that Reno was, in fact, a lost cause.  His fear of Veld’s displeasure was what had taught him that security was to be found in obedience, and when he heard people muttering _Shinra dog_ behind his back he grinned to himself like a dog grins when it wags its tail, because he knew, and they didn’t, why dogs looked so happy all the time.

            So he had no trouble taking orders from the Chief, but Tseng was something else.  Reno resented his air of superiority, the way he was always trying to show everybody else up, and his assumption of authority, which had seemed, to sixteen-year-old Reno, to be based on nothing but his slight advantage in age and his personal closeness to Commander Veld.  What the hell did he know of the real world?  If he’d grown up in Reno’s neighbourhood, he’d have learnt the hard way not to think so much of himself. The Chief’s pampered pet – a spoiled exotic animal - that’s all Mr. high and mighty Tseng was.

            In those early days of Reno’s career a slime of bigotry had still clung to the new Turk, so recently delivered out of the slums, where, if people had nothing else (and they did have nothing else), they had at least the consolation of knowing that there was somebody worse off than they were. They might be poor and downtrodden, but they were still human beings, not Wutai fleas. 

            Several years would have to pass before Reno was finally able to admit himself that the real reason he resented Tseng was because he envied him, because Tseng had all the qualities he admired but knew he would never have. It would be longer still before the full truth dawned: that he would rather die following Tseng on a suicide mission into the pit of hell, than live to take orders from some lesser man.

            That realization was still far in the future on the day they stood confronting each other by the elevators on the 48th floor, one scrawny redheaded boy with sharp elbows and a big mouth, and one young man with dark, almond eyes, wearing a suit and tie and all the dignity of his twenty years.  Tseng stepped out of the elevator; Cissnei, Rude and Rosalind automatically moved aside to give him a clearer view of what they’d all been looking at. Tseng said nothing as he read it, and his face didn’t change its expression.  Then he turned and gave Reno _such_ a look, a look that said - to Reno – that as far as Tseng was concerned Reno was something that had been dragged onto their floor on the sole of the Commander’s shoe and accidentally wiped on their carpet.

            Tseng said, “I’m sure you’ve persuaded yourself that you're a comic genius, Reno, but nobody else is laughing.”

            “Cissnei was,” Reno retorted.

            Cissnei shot him a dirty look. He blamed Tseng for that, too.

            Tseng turned and began to walk away, saying, as he did so, “Get rid of it.”

            Reno’s blood boiled. The slanty-eyed bastard hadn’t even taken the trouble to look him in the face while he gave his ‘order’.  What the hell gave him the right to tell Reno what to do?  He was just a Turk like the rest of them. Okay, so maybe he’d been around the department for a few years longer and maybe he had some _technical_ seniority over Reno, but that didn’t mean he had to talk to Reno like Reno was his _slave_. People weren’t slaves in Midgar.  This wasn’t Wutai.

            Reno longed to be able to hurl these words at him, to articulate his thoughts with knife-edge precision and thus cut Tseng down to size once and for all. Unfortunately, he was so riled up that what came out of his mouth wasn’t at all what he’d hoped or intended.

            “You’re not the boss of me!” he’d shouted.

            Tseng gave no sign that he’d heard, but of course the others had fallen about laughing the moment he was out of sight. And _of course_ it had become a running gag in the department for several weeks afterwards – “No, you can’t borrow my pen, Cissnei, you're not the boss of me!” - “No, make your own coffee, Rude, you’re not the boss of me!” – and even, “No, useless photocopier, I refuse to open your door and remove your paper jam! You’re not the boss of me!” Et cetera. Reno, naturally, regretted having opened his mouth.

            So that was how Tseng got his nick-name. Cissnei was the first to use it to his face; she knew she could get away with that kind of cheekiness with him.  He’d looked slightly pained – _lord, why must I suffer these fools to live? –_ but hadn’t told her off, and so quite soon they were all using it. The first time Veld heard it, he’d laughed, grabbing Tseng by the scruff of the neck and giving him a shake, in an affectionate kind of way, the way a big ornery old raggedy tom cat might handle a half-grown kitten. “Boss, huh?” he’d said.  “I think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself there, son.”  But he’d looked pleased, all the same: like everything was starting to fall into place just the way he’d planned it. Or so it seemed to Reno, as he sat reminiscing over a beer with Rude many years later, remembering what it had been like.

            Fuck, they’d been so young once.

             ****

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired by this conversation at livejournal: http://notraffic.livejournal.com/43815.html. Be warned - if you click on it, you will fall into a swirling morass of rampant fangirling.  
> Can a morass swirl? Maybe I should just google it....  
> Anyway, this vignette is actually an extract from the, like, bazillionth chapter of my unending BC/CC novelisation, but it stands on its own and I haven't posted anything for a while, so I thought, well, why not?  
> If you enjoy well-written stories about the Turks, follow the links to the journals of any of the authors who posted in that thread I've given above, and read their stuff. You will not be disappointed.  
> I would very much welcome rigorous critique of this fic, if anyone feels like it.


End file.
